Wednesday, January 11, 2017

The Music Project Continues: Climbing the Big Wall of Context

Some of them should be cute, so that we can carry on.

I’ve been posting on music for a while, but on a personal,
almost too personal, level (look, I chose the name for this site for a reason),
via the One Last Pick Thru the Bins series (sidebar links pending; plus sample). The word “series” dresses it up a
bit, because it’s just a tour through the audio files on my computer, aka a
review of all the music I’ve collected through my lifetime, thoughts on what
inspired the choices, plus what I’m guessing is pretty goddamn uneven thoughts
on each of the acts.

To cover the basics, though, I’m hyper attuned to lyrics,
and I mean that up to and including the fact that any instrumental that appeals
to me is a rare one. I don’t stray that far – as in, ever – from popular music,
and even virtually all of that comes from English-speaking parts of the West.
(e.g., my tastes only aspire to “eclectic” in the context of a very, very small
pond). I think most Western kids (and old farts) only track American pop, so
that doesn’t read like an actual fault.

Even my “pop” bandwidth is a little narrow, in that I
generally prefer (to coin some useful categories) “expression” over “performance.”
By that I mean, I like musical acts where the artist composes, sings and, best
case, performs his/her songs. That kind of work just strikes me as more
personal, immediate, even intimate in some settings. Performance, meanwhile, is
what you get, not just with Britney Spears (sorry, stupid-old reference; trying
again), Ariana Grande, or Taylor Swift…uh, sorry, I have two girls, so most
points of reference go to female performers, but neither kid really likes those…never
mind. At any rate, the majority of contemporary pure “pop” acts perform songs
written by other people – a lot of ‘em Swedes for some damn reason (and that's a great book) – and, for
the same reason that a play doesn’t (often) feel like real life, the whole
thing feels more like “entertainment widget” than someone baring something
unsightly onstage. Of which, my favorite. Some artists do, however, come close
to selling performance as expression, but, Jesus Christ, enough about me.

Tonight, I’m finally going to get started on the main act of
this barely-received series on all things musical. It was always my intent to
include a contextual element to the One Last Pick Thru the Bins project. The
thing got put on hold for a variety of reasons, but the biggest grew from the actual
problems I experienced in trying to find a good book on the whole history of
American popular music. I could find (and kept checking out) scores of books on very particular aspects of that popular music, but – and I say this knowing
they’re out there – there are simply not a lot of books at my local library
that take a long, broad view of American popular music.

During the months when I lamented the lack of good (paper)
source material, I did poke around the web for resources. And, as with all lazy
bastards, it didn’t take long to slump into Wikipedia. And that’s been fine,
but also a rabbit hole I dare not enter, at least not before thinking through
how I want to present the material (because, rabbit hole). Per the “rabbit hole”
allusion, Wikipedia actually crawls with resources – I mean I could spend
months clicking through link after link after link, until I drilled down to,
say, Chuck Berry’s belly button and favorite ice cream flavor. To begin,
though, I mostly stuck to one specific page titled, “Music of the United States.”
To its credit, though, it owns the reality that word “popular” is earned – e.g.,
it’s what most of us listen to - and that’s exactly what makes it useful.

One other thing about Wikipedia’s “Music of the United
States” page: it’s pretty goddamn woke. One sentence, in particular, comes
early (this one):

“The development of an African American musical identity,
out of disparate sources from Africa and Europe, has been a constant theme in
the music history of the United States.”

But that idea seems to carry through pretty damn well,
especially in the pages that relate to the earliest forms of American pop (e.g.
vaudeville). What musical knowledge I have hints pretty strongly to the idea
that African Americans pioneered the beginnings of most American popular music,
so that’s fair in my book. For all that, I intend to learn as I go, to listen
to what the internet tells me, and in the faith that some white nationalist
putz (deliberate) hasn’t gone through and doctored the pages in order to
preserve a couple myths, y’know, for The Cause.

I’ve been probing the various paths to discussing Wikipedia’s
content. Damned hard stuff, that, because there are a million trails and they
all go to different parts of the same enormously vast country that comprises
American popular music. I can’t wait to get started on that, honestly, but I’m
also glad to have been granted a reprieve at long last.

I finally found a book, one titled America’s Musical Life:
A History, by Richard Crawford. First of all, it is well-written and
informative, at least so far as subjects of which I’m functionally ignorant,
but it also feels, in a word, scholarly (euphemism for dry). It's also enjoyable because genuine interest makes
for one hell of a motivator, I intended to start the book with the
birth of Vaudeville, but there was something about the titles to the book’s
earlier chapters that forever beckoned me closer to Page 1. I finally decided
to start on page 56 (of, goddammit, page 859, because, compromise), which bears
the irresistible heading, “’Old Simple Ditties’: Colonial Songs, Dance, and
Home Music.” I know, right? (EEEeeeeeeeeeee!!!)

The One Last Pick Thru the Bins series will continue (up
next, The Coup from the Bay Area (good stuff, guys)), but I’m going to start working
in the contextual stuff starting with the fastest reasonable read of Crawford’s
tome. Since the library owns it, and I don’t, this should (or needs to) go
pretty fast, but we’ll see. I promise nothing. (And that’s one of the benefits
of writing for you own fuck-off sites instead of working for someone else.)

The first post in all this context stuff, however, will
start with a singular piece of weirdness that I kept coming across in Wikipedia’s
post. Apparently, that site can’t talk about American popular music without
going deep on “Hawaiian Music,” which, not to devalue it, but…no, this one I’m
not getting. It’s like calling Zydeco a defining player on the popular music scene,
and Wikipedia’s volunteer editors didn’t do that, so…

Anyway, that’ll be Feature No. 1. After that, it’s the march
through Crawford’s book. Even if I have to buy the thing. [For this last
sentence, I want anyone visiting to read this in what they imagine to be the
most-PBS of all PBS presenter voices. Here goes…]:

So, I hope you’ll join me on this journey back into America’s
musical past. All you need are tapping toes.